Drive and Audio Performance Results

Our drive and audio testing differs a bit from the rest of our testing, for several reasons. First of all, when it comes to drive performance comparison, nearly every platform on the market is very close to one another, as most do provide external drive controllers which means the numbers offered are very much platform agnostic. And finally, with audio, we do not list any numbers except for those reported by the product we are testing in order to provide the most information possible, as each audio CODEC will behave quite differently, and each board does not employ the same CODEC. As such, there is no standard we can use other than the numbers themselves. You can always check our other motherboard reviews in order to make direct comparisons to audio performance.

We've tested each drive interface separately in order to provide the most complete numbers possible. Employing HDTune Pro for all of the testing, we tested each drive outside of the OS environment, using a separate OS on a separate drive. However, we do use drives with a fair amount of data on them (60% full) to simulate performance in real-world situations.

HDTune Pro (SATA2)

In HDTune Pro SATA 3 GB/s performance, we found the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H WiFi to return results exactly as expected, right near the top, although slightly lower than other products. Overall, it's just 0.5 MB/s slower than the best result. A small amount, so nothing to really be concerned about.

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

SATA 6 Gb/s showed the opposite of SATA 3 Gb/s, with the Z77-UD5H WiFi taking the top result.

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

USB 3.0 drive performance did not fail to put the Z77-UD5H WiFi on top either, something I wasn't expecting at all.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

The RMAA results given by the Gigabyte Z77-UD5H WiFi are rated by RMAA as "GOOD", and that's really about all we can say. It is not particularly loud, but did produce considerable volume, but nothing really stood out for us. We've tested other Realtek ALC898 solutions and received better results, which proved shocking considering the nice Creative software package that looks pretty. It would be nice if the quality matched. If we look at the numbers provided by RMAA directly, the bass is a bit heavy, while the treble is a bit thin, while volume was fairly decent. There was a bit of distortion noticed, seemingly produced via Stereo Crosstalk, which was fairly high. This leads to a very average performance, nothing overly bad, but nothing that knocked our socks off, either. This is not the first time we've run into an ALC898 performing like this, so it's really not even worth thinking about.